Times reporters blog about high school sports across the Southland

Football: A backup plan is needed for next CIF bowl finale

In case no one has noticed, technology has made it possible to play a football game without mud. Yes, it's called a synthetic field, and there's dozens of them in Southern California.

Rain greatly influenced last weekend's CIF state championship bowl games at the Home Depot Center in Carson. The field was full of water and mud by the fifth game in two days. Did it affect the games? Absolutely. Would a synthetic field have changed the outcome? Perhaps in one or two of the games but certainly not the Open Division final.

Yes, it was fair to all the teams. But the Northern California schools are used to playing in the rain. The Southern California schools are not. That doesn't mean you cancel a championship game because it's raining. It means the CIF needs to find an all-weather field with enough seating capacity to make people feel comfortable and let the players perform at a high level.

East Los Angeles College, which has an all-weather field and has held 25,000 for Roosevelt-Garfield games, would seem an ideal venue. That's my suggestion for the next time it rains heavily.

One reason they hold the football championships in Southern California is the belief that the weather will be better at this time of year than Northern California. If it's going to rain, then they might as well find a venue in Northern California, because the fans don't seem to mind rain.